As schematic as Third Person is on a whole, it’s downright risible on a moment-to-moment basis.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Village Voice by Amy Nicholson
When the head-scratching impossibilities are more irritating than intriguing, does the last-second explanation outweigh the two hours we've spent rolling our eyes?
The Guardian by Catherine Shoard
Third Person is a work of staggering trash; an ensemble drama with the aesthetic of an in-flight magazine, but less classy writing.
The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and changeable, shifting abruptly from snuggling happiness to angry defiance.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
The drama and intensity that are [Haggis's] signatures are mostly missing from these vividly dramatized but uninvolving romantic crises, none of which are particularly believable.
It’s crushing, then, that the movie’s big reveal is the kind of narrative do-over that could only spring from the mind of an almighty writer in love with playing God — or with himself.
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
Third Person is an audacious failure, one that even its starry cast can't save. With a trite script, and an even more glib thematic undercurrent, Third Person is nothing short of an outright embarrassment.
Paul Haggis’ Third Person has nothing to say and spends 2 ¹/? hours not saying it. Its combination of pretentiousness, vanity and vapidity suggests Alain Resnais directing a triple episode of “Guiding Light.”
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the title of this writerly tale — Third Person — has to do with the sometimes illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to a resolution with each is not.
Slant Magazine by Steve Macfarlane
If the glue holding Crash's arcs together was Paul Haggis's belief in the power of racism, this time it's love.